Hate Ebay? How you can help me.

cyberbob

Sounds like someone else who has had a wonderful idea that they think no one else has had but when the problems are pointed out just can't take their blinkers off.

OP your wasting your time put your time and effort into something else that might have a chance of giving you a return. If ebid haven't managed to compete with ebay in over 10 years with free listing for sellers and no direct buyer fees to put potential buyers off why do you think you can.

What does your site bring to the Market others don't already have? Nothing. You say you will invest any income back into the site but you need an income to do that which you wont have.

The only way to even have a vague chance of getting a site like this off the ground is to have an original concept (which you don't) and millions to spend on advertising and promotion (which I assume you also don't have)

Do yourself and your bank balance a favour and find something else. Dozens of sites like yours start up on a daily basis and they all fail.

laying4Profit wrote:

Im going to be sticking with the Buyer Fee as i think it will work

Why do you think ebay push free postage and Amazon offer free postage it's because customers do not like visible surcharges. If I as a buyer see an item on ebay and your site both for the same price with sellers with similar credentials who do you think I would go for the one with the customer surcharge or not.

Surcharges make customers think they are paying more even if they are not. It's all about perception if the first thing a buyer sees when they come to your site is they will get charged by you for buying they will leave your site before even looking around it no matter what good deals you have.

laying4profit

soolin wrote: »

Forget ebay, you are really looking to compete with ebid who have completely free listings, so how can you tempt buyers when ebid can't?

Oh yes, You are going to charge buyers a fee..whilst they can still use ebid and buy for free, not sure I quite see the 'hook' you have to tempt buyers in. Sellers are easy, we'll flog our stuff anywhere but the most important people in all this is the buyers, without them you cannot survive.

Whilst a Standard seller account maybe Free to list, you will incurr a 3% FVF (30p for a £10 sale)
You only get everylisting Free if you have the Seller+ account. This costs you the seller:-
7 Day £1.99
30 Day £6.99
90 Day £16.99
365 Day £49.99
Lifetime £74.99 (currently available for £49.49 if upgrade takes place within 24 hours of registration OR any other upgrade)

So which ever way you look at it Ebid actually cost the seller money in one form or another.
If as a seller you are willing to pay a 3% FVF then you would say to the buyer on my site in your listing you would knock off the buyer fee. And you would STILL be saving money.

Ebays main rival is e-crater but this is based in the US so that does not count.
How about Bonanza.. Again US based and they charge a fee to sell.
Cqout Again free listing but hit you with the FVF 5.29%- 1.76% and only 1 pic free.
Trust me i have been though most of them. This is not done on a whim.

As a business i think that it has potential. It offers the seller a free place to list items.They know that the will NOT incurr a fee. This means that they can lower the price of the said item to attract more buyers.The buyer pays the fee, But if the seller wants to say "We will deduct the fee for you" then thats up to them. It is no different to one seller saying P&P = £5.95 and another seller saying P&P = Free. You take from one and add to another.

laying4profit

cyberbob wrote: »

Sounds like someone else who has had a wonderful idea that they think no one else has had but when the problems are pointed out just can't take their blinkers off.

OP your wasting your time put your time and effort into something else that might have a chance of giving you a return. If ebid haven't managed to compete with ebay in over 10 years with free listing for sellers and no direct buyer fees to put potential buyers off why do you think you can.

What does your site bring to the Market others don't already have? Nothing. You say you will invest any income back into the site but you need an income to do that which you wont have.

The only way to even have a vague chance of getting a site like this off the ground is to have an original concept (which you don't) and millions to spend on advertising and promotion (which I assume you also don't have)

Do yourself and your bank balance a favour and find something else. Dozens of sites like yours start up on a daily basis and they all fail.

Why do you think ebay push free postage and Amazon offer free postage it's because customers do not like visible surcharges. If I as a buyer see an item on ebay and your site both for the same price with sellers with similar credentials who do you think I would go for the one with the customer surcharge or not.

Surcharges make customers think they are paying more even if they are not. It's all about perception if the first thing a buyer sees when they come to your site is they will get charged by you for buying they will leave your site before even looking around it no matter what good deals you have.

Sorry but im not about to jack it in, just because a few people say it wont work.
The whole point of this (MSE) site is about what?? Saving money..
So you are telling me that if you saw an item on ebay for £100 and an item on my site for £95. You would buy the one on Ebay.Of course you wouldnt.
The fee is nothing. people are just so used to the way all these auction site's work.The seller get's annoyed about fees, you see it all the time, they moan about NPB's,complain about other fees,FVF,Paypal fees,How ebay protect the buyer all the time even when its clearly wrong.
Ebay have share holders to protect, without these they go under.Just because its a multi billon pound operation does not mean it is safe.They will protect the shareholders stake before anything else.
And as i have already said about E-bid, they do charge the seller. A FVF is a fee. So it is not 100% free to SELL on there is it. It is just free to LIST which is totally different.Are you sure that its not the 3% FVF that has put these seller off??

soolin

laying4profit wrote: »

Whilst a Standard seller account maybe Free to list, you will incurr a 3% FVF (30p for a £10 sale)
You only get everylisting Free if you have the Seller+ account. This costs you the seller:-
7 Day £1.99
30 Day £6.99
90 Day £16.99
365 Day £49.99
Lifetime £74.99 (currently available for £49.49 if upgrade takes place within 24 hours of registration OR any other upgrade)

So which ever way you look at it Ebid actually cost the seller money in one form or another.
If as a seller you are willing to pay a 3% FVF then you would say to the buyer on my site in your listing you would knock off the buyer fee. And you would STILL be saving money.

Ebays main rival is e-crater but this is based in the US so that does not count.
How about Bonanza.. Again US based and they charge a fee to sell.
Cqout Again free listing but hit you with the FVF 5.29%- 1.76% and only 1 pic free.
Trust me i have been though most of them. This is not done on a whim.

As a business i think that it has potential. It offers the seller a free place to list items.They know that the will NOT incurr a fee. This means that they can lower the price of the said item to attract more buyers.The buyer pays the fee, But if the seller wants to say "We will deduct the fee for you" then thats up to them. It is no different to one seller saying P&P = £5.95 and another seller saying P&P = Free. You take from one and add to another.

I'm still trying to work out what makes you different though and why you think buyers will come to you rather than say ebid?

I have an Ebid account I paid around £15 - £20 a few years ago so all my listing and FVFs are free, however, (and this is a big However) despite running shops on there and undercutting my ebay prices considerably I can't sell anything. There are NO buyers. Buyers actually prefer to buy from my account on ebay and pay more.

So, forget selelrs, we are the easy part, why will buyers come to you when you are dearer for them than anywhere else?

custardy

if you want to rival ebay
you need it to be 100% free for buyers.infact you would most likely have to offer discount vouchers to draw buyers in
for sellers you need to undercut ebay
but the main thing is you need to bring buyers in and that will take money
got enough to rival ebay and advertise to take away their customer base?

soolin

You'd also need a few million for product placement. have you noticed that ebaying is almost a verb now. We no longer sell online we 'ebay', the term comes up over and over again mainly in American TV programmes and films. Only recently I've read some chick lit novels and they talk a lot about 'ebaying' their goods to raise money.

huge sites have already given up, I started on Freeserve auctions they closed and sent us all to ebay. Then Yahoo closed along with several others. The only other ones doing any good at all are tiny niche auction sites as has already been mentioned when crafters or whatever can sell their goods.

If you get on here in the morning before the moderating team have started removing spam you'll see several launches of ebay/ebid competitors every month. I still have some 'watched' that people have advertised very few ever get more than the founder and his family and very close friends listing and most don't even appear on a simple Google search for auctions. If you are looking for a fixed price model to emulate then look at PriceMinster. That looked very hopeful for a while (and yes I have a selling account on there). They gave away £5 vouchers to everyone signing up..I used that to buy a £5 book, opened a selling account and have never bought or sold a thing since. It hasn't even been mentioned on this thread which shows how quickly even a big site can sink from our memory, yet that site is apparently very big on the continent and threw an awful lot of money at the UK market.

To make money now you need to forget this, it has been done, find the next big thing. What will we all do when we get bored of online auctions? That's where the money is.

laying4profit

soolin wrote: »

I'm still trying to work out what makes you different though and why you think buyers will come to you rather than say ebid?

I have an Ebid account I paid around £15 - £20 a few years ago so all my listing and FVFs are free, however, (and this is a big However) despite running shops on there and undercutting my ebay prices considerably I can't sell anything. There are NO buyers. Buyers actually prefer to buy from my account on ebay and pay more.

So, forget selelrs, we are the easy part, why will buyers come to you when you are dearer for them than anywhere else?

Buyer will use my site because the items on sale will be cheaper.You are basing this your own experience using your own account. If i am not charging the seller any fees at all then this means the seller can list the item for less. If the item is less on my site (inc fee) than it is elsewhere then i am sure buyers wont mind.

I understand that you sell on ebay and it form a part of your income. And i also understand that as a business you hate the free listing days on ebay because you are then competing with the general public.
My site is there for the general public/businesses to use. It is there to sell items.I want there to be competition on my site for the best prices. Like Tesco v Asda.. These two giants always compete with eachother on prices, but customers will go where they feel best.Its not just about the deal, its whatelse you offer. Like service.. How quick you deal with problems. These all count to a sucessful business as well.:D

custardy

laying4profit wrote: »

Buyer will use my site because the items on sale will be cheaper.You are basing this your own experience using your own account. If i am not charging the seller any fees at all then this means the seller can list the item for less. If the item is less on my site (inc fee) than it is elsewhere then i am sure buyers wont mind.

I understand that you sell on ebay and it form a part of your income. And i also understand that as a business you hate the free listing days on ebay because you are then competing with the general public.
My site is there for the general public/businesses to use. It is there to sell items.I want there to be competition on my site for the best prices. Like Tesco v Asda.. These two giants always compete with eachother on prices, but customers will go where they feel best.Its not just about the deal, its whatelse you offer. Like service.. How quick you deal with problems. These all count to a sucessful business as well.:D

so what you mean is you will have all the services of ebay but be cheaper to buy the items?
the problem there is.is everything on ebay now the cheapest available on the net?

sunnysea83

i dont think your site if it exists is going to work, you havent actually had someone on here say they would use it as buyer and youve had a lot of replies and input from MSE users. As a seller I wont bother wasting time listing an item if the site has no buyers!

KChildheart

sunnysea83 wrote: »

i dont think your site if it exists is going to work, you havent actually had someone on here say they would use it as buyer and youve had a lot of replies and input from MSE users. As a seller I wont bother wasting time listing an item if the site has no buyers!

If your website provides the opportunity to buy items in an easy to navigate way it is inevitable that custom will arrive. They will spread the message through word of mouth and this is the only real way that companies succeed.

What I see here is the opportunity to save money. It costs nothing to list an item, or re-list, true I might have to bump my prices up a bit to negate the sur-charge, but the fact is, it is far less than the charges put forward by 'Feebay'.

So we've attracted sellers. Now you're telling me, a market place in a rich business district, selling many different items at a lower cost than the highstreet stores because of lower overheads, won't attract buyers?

That just doesn't make sense. Buyers will always look for the better deal. That is what this site, moneysavingexpert encourages and promotes vastly.

The only problem with this theory is that it requires a number of sellers to already be listing items. But isn't that what buyers expect?